Galen Healthcare Solutions: Allscripts Consultants Enterprise EHR

Success always comes when preparation meets opportunity ~Henry L. Hartman

As I reflect on my experience in AEHR, the above quote resonates.  Working on projects in the roles of an 11.2 Allscripts Enterprise Upgrade Project Manager, as well as an Implementation Consultant for new builds, my clients who achieve their desired results are consistently the ones who own the process and perform extensive due diligence on behalf of their organization.

Below are four factors to explore when preparing for your success. I have outlined “opportunity”, in the form of questions that must be thoughtfully answered, to optimally position your organization for seamless transition to a new Allscripts Enterprise AEHR release or platform.

1. Product Functionality, Design and Additional Considerations

2. Workflow Analysis, Testing and Training

3. Go Live Preparation

4. Leveraging HIT

Product Functionality, Design and Additional Considerations

In this day and age, “You don’t know what you don’t know” is no longer a valid response when making critical design and configuration considerations for your Enterprise AEHR.  Resources are available.

• Are you engaging in dialog with the Allscripts Community online via Client Connect  and referencing the Allscripts Application Design and Behavior Resource?
• Have you reviewed the latest Allscripts Client Release Notes that outline Known Issues lists and any issues for a release of which you should be aware?
• Have you registered for available educational opportunitiesprovided by leading professionals in the industry?
• Are you maintaining your Build Activity Workbook to reflect not only your decisions, but the thought process behind them, to ensure that a re-visitation will not constitute a reinvention of the wheel?

Workflow analysis, Testing and Training
These three elements are imperative to understanding how your build decisions will impact your organization, individual clinics and employees, right on down to your end consumers.

• Have you thoroughly vetted and documented your current and future state workflows?
• Have hybrid roles effectively been addressed?  For example, if a user is acting in a Front Desk, Medical Records, Call Processing and Referral capacity, should a customized Clinical Desktop be created to accommodate the various components necessary to perform all the associated responsibilities?
• Are your worklist and tasklist views capturing the correct data and utilizing the most meaningful criteria to cater to the specialty of your clinic?
• Are there too many views?  Is there a view for a supervisor to monitor all overdue tasks?  Is it more effective to assign tasks to specific users or to a team?
• Are your users educated on how to change their preferences to complement their individual work style within their workflows?

Go Live Preparation
Successful implementation only becomes relevant upon going live.

• Do you have adequate staff onsite to support your users and providers experiencing workflow, application and/or hardware problems?
• For Upgrades, have you created and distributed job aids highlighting new or altered functionality that may require different or unfamiliar behaviors within identified workflows (satisfying clinical quality data reporting initiatives to demonstrate Meaningful Use, for example)?
• Do you have a rollback plan if you encounter a system crippling issue? Will this necessitate a return to paper records (and are they available for reference)?  If so, who will be that decision maker and how will this message be communicated?
• Do you have a Command Center in place to serve as a centralized hub for user support, in addition to a systematic process for issue documentation and ticket submission across multiple vendors?  Is there a point person or team tracking these issues and their resolution?

Leveraging HIT
Now that you are live on AEHR, are you leveraging your Health Information Technology to fully facilitate the efforts of physicians and clinicians to meet the highest standards of patient care?  Some considerations for Enterprise organizations include:

• Participation in Meaningful Use
• A business continuity solution
• Integrated Health Calculators
• Integration with HIE

When it comes to the implementation, deployment and maintenance of your Allscripts Enterprise AEHR, success is no accident.  I encourage you to Embrace the New World of Healthcare; please contact Galen Healthcare Solutions at sales@galenhealthcare.com for more information.

Tags: Allscripts Enterprise EHR, Business Continuity, Galen Webcast Series, Successful EHR Implementation, VitalCenter

Do you have Allscripts PM?  Did you know that Allscripts PM has its own interface engine called AIE (Allscripts Interface Engine)?  Have you ever logged into AIE before?  Have you wondered how to setup your own interface in AIE?  Do you want to have more ability to monitor what is coming in and out of PM via the interfaces?

If you are answering ‘Yes’ as you read through this then the Galen technical services team would like to invite you to join us in our Boston office for a day of Free Allscripts PM Interface Training.

Who: Allscripts Interface Analysts

What: Free Allscripts PM Interface Training

Where: 70 Federal Street, 7th Floor, Boston, MA 02110.

When: Wednesday, March 28th, 2012 from 9AM-5PM with lunch provided. There will also be a cocktails and networking hour from 4PM-5PM with beer, wine and light snacks.

Why: Learn about the details of monitoring, maintaining and developing interfaces for Allscripts PM.

Agenda:

• AIE Overview
• AIE Monitoring and Troubleshooting
• AIE Interface Development
• Registration and Scheduling Interfaces
• Charge and Patient Inbound Interfaces
• Eligibility Interfaces
• Much More!

Please contact us if there is a topic you would like to learn more about that isn’t in the list above.

Travel: If you are driving into the city, there are parking garages nearby. The cheapest and most convenient is the Winthrop Square Parking Garage at $20/day. If you are coming in from out of town, there are many hotels in the area. Also note that we will have wireless internet and workstations with a hardwired internet connection available for those who need it.

Space is limited – register today!  If you can’t make the training, it’s ok! Galen offers free webcasts about every two weeks. Including a webcast that is specific to AIE in June.

We have received a warm response to eCalcs, Galen’s latest bolt on for the Allscripts Enterprise EHR.

We have received a lot of compliments along the way – integrated health calculators are much needed, that Galen put out a thoughtfully crafted product, and even that we finally listened a built this type of add-on tool that makes providers happy. That last one is my favorite – it’s a tough time for providers with the rush to Meaningful Use and now to ICD-10, many feel that they are taking on more work with lower results. If we can provide a “cool tool” that makes life easier, I couldn’t be happier.

What we have also received are plenty of questions about how it works. You can cite the scores into a Note? How are the scores stored in EHR – as Results? Questions like those.

This How To video will help answer those questions. It’s just under three minutes long and covers the major functionality within eCalcs and its integration with the EHR.

Our marketing firm also sent over a concise and rather visually pleasing brochure for eCalcs. Thanks guys!

Tags: Allscripts Application Integration, Allscripts Enterprise EHR, EHR eCalc, Extensibility, Framingham Risk Calculator, Galen eCalc, Integration

—Discrete Clinical Data Elements as the building blocks to a Connected Health Platform—

Broken down to its basis, any vision of a truly connected Health Network will be reliant on the ability to pass, and ultimately present, discrete data elements.  Although the audiences for the information will be diverse, and the front-end systems will vary, the foundation of the information is the same.  In order to unlock the value that lies in the data being captured every day, an organization must have solid planning and execution. 

Each organization we work with is unique, but overall themes are constant: Reporting for Meaningful Use, Optimizing Health Care Decisions with Analytics, and Growth through Acquisition or Partnership.     

If we consider Clinical Data as building blocks that will be used, in whole or part, to support these efforts, we need to ensure both the ease of access and integrity of that data.  Galen has leading expertise and insight on conversions, reporting, and interfaces that can help you down this path. 

So how do you take the first steps in creating solid building blocks?  We would recommend to:

Define and establish consistency in electronic documentation and workflow.  This starts by understanding the EHR build and configuration decisions that will impact both availability and integrity of the data.   This consistency will also pay dividends to the organization by making the support of the Enterprise EHR system more predictable and efficient. 

Independent of your organization’s current state, Galen has the breadth and depth of expertise to help achieve your vision.

Tags: Allscripts Consultants, Allscripts Enterprise EHR, Clinical Conversion, Data Conversion, EHR Implementation, Enterprise EHR, Healthcare IT, Interoperability

We’re excited about this one.

For years, doctors have been using tools like the Framingham Risk Calculator to estimate risk for a number of different disease states – like cardiovascular disease, diabetes and breast cancer. These calculators use information commonly found in the patient’s chart like vital signs, lab values and age. The risk scores are increasingly being typed back into the chart.

eCalcs are . . .

Integrated into the EHR – with one click of a button you are brought to a host of the most common health calculators, including the Framingham Risk Calculators.

Patient Specific – pulling in the relevant data from the current patient’s chart.

Documented back into the EHR – the risk scores can be added back into the patient’s chart with a single click.

For a full product overview, and a link to the eCalcs brochure, visit the eCalcs page on our wiki.

Contact information

Cary Bresloff, VP – Sales and Marketing, 312-878-2349 or Cary.Bresloff@galenhealthcare.com

Drew Bradle, Account Manager, 312-239-6648 or Drew.Bradle@galenhealthcare.com

 In this demo, we will present Allscripts Enterprise EHR and RelayHealth Portal integration capability. This solution facilitates seamless integration between the two applications, offering single sign-on, messaging between provider and patient,and patient online indicator functionality.

Contact us today so your organization can realize the compelling benefits of Enterprise EHR RelayHealth Portal integration.

Tags: Allscripts Enterprise EHR, Allscripts Patient Portal Integration, Application Integration, EHR Patient Portal Integration, Enterprise EHR, Extensibility, Integration, Patient Online Indicator, Patient Portal Integration, RelayHealth, Single Sign-On